The present invention relates generally to the field of industrial design evolution and optimization and in particular to a new and useful method for designing optimized industrial products, such as printed circuit boards, incorporating nearly real-time design-manufacturer-supplier decision making.
Previous work at the Electronics Agile Manufacturing Research Institute (EAMRI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has recognized the critical role which information infrastructure plays in the design and manufacturing organizations.
The necessity to overcome information barriers between companies working together is discussed, for example, in an article written by Michael W. Sobolewski and Joseph W. Erkes, "CAMnet: Architecture and Applications" found in Proceedings of Concurrent Engineering 1995 Conference, pages 627-634, McLean, Va., August 1995. The Sobolewski et al. article describes research activities in the areas of architecture and functionality for the Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAMnet) project. The goal of the CAMnet project is to develop and demonstrate enablers for delivering manufacturing services across virtual enterprises. Virtual enterprises or partnerships are formed by companies having complimentary capabilities who are able to join together to exploit market opportunities. Virtual enterprises require information technology, such as computers and Internet to overcome distance and time barriers to allow coordination and cooperation.
The EAMRI work has focused on electronics products for both commercial and defense applications. The objective of the work is to improve productivity and response time through improvements in information infrastructure. In this work, the improvement in manufacturing activity is achieved by shortening the response time of individual entities and by selecting alternative strategies to maximize responsiveness of the global enterprise. Based on the current state of the art, manual transfer of data between systems and manual analysis are the only viable alternatives.
Of particular interest to the EAMRI, the detailed design of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA) consumes a large portion of the time required to bring a new product to market and is therefore a focus of its information infrastructure work. This phase of the design effort that we identify as the "detailed design phase" uses the circuit design schematics as an input and concludes with an approved design ready for manufacturing implementation. During this detailed design phase, the PCBA designer makes decisions about component selection and the physical design of the printed circuit board layers and connection points. This resulting physical design should match the performance characteristics of the schematic design used as a beginning for this design phase.
A class of support technologies used by the PCBA designer is known as CAD, or Computer-Aided Design tools. CAD tools make use of component libraries containing data on the electrical and physical attributes of the possible components to be incorporated in the design. CAD tools, however, do not provide the designer with information about the price or the availability of components. In current practice, therefore, critical design decisions about the PCBA do not benefit from this information.
Additional information items, such as, component price, component availability, and manufacturing capacity availability at supply sites, among others, are highly variable and time dependent. These information items are also critically important to the detailed design phase so as to result in PCBA designs that can be manufactured within cost and cycle time objectives.
Without this important information, current PCBA designs often cost more and take longer to get into the marketplace than is necessary. This has led to major interest in U.S. electronics companies to find ways to reduce cost and cycle time.
A technology is needed 1) to capture price, availability and manufacturing capacity information from the potential suppliers of material and manufacturing services (e.g., fabrication or assembly/test); 2) to take advantage of the near real-time nature of the information in terms of its accuracy; and 3) to present the information for use by designers in the detailed design phase for PCBAs. Since the PCBA designer must often choose from among many options for electronic components, many different suppliers of component parts, and various manufacturing technologies (e.g. pin through-hole or surface mount) representing their PCBA design, a fourth attribute of the needed technology is that it is an automated system.
Presently, there are no commercial systems with features and functions targeted to address these problems with PCBA design. Further, the inventors are not aware of any known automated systems that have these features and functions either.
John Koza et. al. in "Automated Synthesis of Analog Electrical Circuits by Means of Genetic Programming", IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 109-128, 1997, describe an automated process utilizing genetic programming for designing both the topology and the sizing of the components of an electrical circuit. As described in the article, the goal of their work is to automatically design an electrical circuit which satisfies a set of user-specified design goals. In order to apply genetic programming to circuit synthesis, a mapping has been established between point-labeled trees in genetic programming and line-labeled cyclic graphs used in electrical circuits. A simple embryonic circuit is used for building a more complex circuit by evolving circuits using component-creating and connection-modifying functions. The number of input signals and the number of output signals of an electrical circuit determines the embryonic circuit used in a particular problem. The algorithm has been applied to a number of circuit synthesis problems, one of which was the design of an asymmetric bandpass filter. Koza et al. demonstrate that automatic synthesis of electrical circuits through genetic evolution can be competitive with human performance. However, Koza et al. still lack the incorporating real-time, or nearly real-time data into the design process and optimization of the design for cost and manufacturing efficiency, as well as product function efficiency.
Articles of interest generally describing a system for incorporating many different design features include Sanderson et al., "Multipath Agility in Electronics Manufacturing", IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 1994. Sanderson et al. describe theoretical systems being explored by EAMRI to develop an agile manufacturing system.
In Hocaoglu et al., "Implementation and Assessment of a Distributed, Object-Oriented Information Infrastructure for Agile Electronics Manufacturing", Proceedings of the third ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 1996, the authors generally describe a wide area network (WAN) for transferring data between different groups of suppliers, manufacturers, designers and customers in an agile manufacturing system. Specific connections and interrelations between the different components of the supplier-manufacturer system are not described.
Another general description of an integrated design-supplier-manufacturer agile manufacturing system is found in Hocaoglu et al., "Meeting Today's Design Challenges With Agile Manufacturing", Printed Circuit Design, pages 34-36, September 1997. The article notes in particular that a method for communication between a virtual design environment and distributed knowledge databases to permit linking of the information was being developed.
Other articles of note include R. J. Graves, Arthur C. Sanderson, Cem Hocaoglu and R. Subbu, "Electronics Agile Manufacturing Research Institute: Information Infrastructure Research and Demonstration." The 1998 NSF Design and Manufacturing Grantees Conference, Jan. 5-8, 1998, Monterey, Mexico; Mizoguchi et al. "Production Genetic Algorithms for Automated Hardware Design Through an Evolutionary Process", Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation, pp. 661-664, April 1994; John R. Koza, F. H. Bennett III, D. Andre :M. A. Keane and F. Dunlap, "Automated Synthesis of Analog Electrical Circuits by Means of Genetic Programming", IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 109-128, 1997; and M. S. Fox and S. F. Smith, "ISIS--a knowledge-based system for factory scheduling", Expert Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 25-49, 1984. Patents which disclose design optimization or evolution methods and apparatus include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,148,513, 5,598,566, 5,615,124, 5,761,381 and 5,764,953.